27 January 2014

If you don't listen closely it sounds like 'Idaho.' And with place names like Plymouth and Cascade, and words like "westward," you could easily pass it for "Hills of Idaho." The Bay of Biscay gives it away, as does references to sailors. It's worth a good hum, though, and it's still a nice place to land.

In the Flesh

It is not an unusual life-curve for Westerners--to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment. --Wallace Stegner, "Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood"